Some of the first humans to arrive in Tasmania, over 41,000 years ago, used fire to shape and manage the landscape, a new study from The Australian National University (ANU) and the University of Cambridge has found. It is thought to be the earliest and most detailed record of humans using fire in the Tasmanian environment. According to the researchers, early inhabitants of Tasmania were managing forests and grasslands by burning them to create open spaces, possibly for food procurement and cultural activities. The team analysed traces of charcoal and pollen contained in ancient mud that showed how Indigenous Tasmanians (Palawa) ...

About The Study: Inferences about clinical impacts based on population-level mean treatment effects may be misleading, since even small between-group differences may reflect clinically important treatment benefits for individual patients. Results of this study suggest that clinical trials should explicitly describe the distributions of Kansas City Cardiomyopathy Questionnaire change at the patient level within treatment groups to support the clinical interpretation of their results.  Corresponding ...

“This commentary will discuss what is known about such combinatorial treatments, including potential mechanisms and future protocols.” BUFFALO, NY- November 15, 2024 – A new review was published in Volume 11 of Oncoscience on November 12, 2024, entitled, “Targeting carbohydrate metabolism in colorectal cancer - synergy between DNA-damaging agents, cannabinoids, and intermittent serum starvation.” As highlighted by the authors in the abstract of this review, chemotherapy is a common treatment for many cancers. However, it is often ineffective for long-term patient survival and ...

Stress is a double-edged sword when it comes to memory: stressful or otherwise emotional events are usually more memorable, but stress can also make it harder for us to retrieve memories. In PTSD and generalized anxiety disorder, overgeneralizing aversive memories results in an inability to discriminate between dangerous and safe stimuli. However, until now, it wasn’t clear whether stress played a role in memory generalization. Now, neuroscientists report November 15 in the Cell Press journal Cell that acute stress prevents mice from forming specific memories. Instead, the stressed mice formed generalized memories, which are ...

PHILADELPHIA—Debate continues to swirl nationally on the fate of a practice born of an 86-year-old federal statute allowing companies to pay workers with disabilities subminimum wages: anything below the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, but for some roles as little as 25-cents-per-hour. Those in favor of repealing this statute highlight assumptions about reduced productivity along with the unfairness of this wage level—often used elsewhere to pay, for example, food service workers who typically make additional wages in tips. Those against repeal have voiced concerns that, without subminimum ...

EMBARGOED: NOT FOR RELEASE UNTIL FRIDAY 15 NOVEMBER 2024 AT 11:00 ET (15:00 UK TIME). Researchers are calling for a ‘resilience index’ to be used as an indicator of policy success instead of the current focus on GDP. They say that GDP ignores the wider implications of development and provides no information on our ability to live within our planet’s ‘safe operating space’. In a paper published today [15 November] in the journal One Earth, researchers from the University of Southampton, UCL ...

Researchers at The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) have uncovered that stress changes how our brain encodes and retrieves aversive memories, and discovered a promising new way to restore appropriate memory specificity in people with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).   If you stumble during a presentation, you might feel stressed the next time you have to present because your brain associates your next presentation with that one poor and aversive experience. This type of stress is tied to one memory. But stress from traumatic events ...

A team of researchers from McGill and Université de Montréal’s Observatoire pour l’éducation et la santé des enfants (OPES, or observatory on children’s health and eduation), led by Sylvana Côté, found that spending two hours a week of class time in a natural environment can reduce emotional distress among 10- to 12-year-olds who had the most significant mental health problems before the program began. The research comes on the heels of the publication of a UNICEF ...

mRNA vaccines saved lives during the COVID-19 pandemic, but older people had less of an immune response to the vaccines than did younger adults. Why? Boston Children’s researchers, led by Byron Brook, PhD, and Ofer Levy, MD, PhD, have found some answers, while providing proof-of-concept of a new system that can model vaccine responses in a dish. The test system, described in a paper out today in iScience, is called MEMPHIS (Modular Evaluation of immunogenicity using Multi-Platform Human In vitro Systems). It analyzes whole human blood from people of different age groups and applies both proteomics and targeted assays to measure ...

More time spent sitting, reclining or lying down during the day may increase the risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD) and death, according to a study in JACC, the flagship journal of the American College of Cardiology, and presented at the American Heart Association’s Scientific Sessions 2024. More than roughly 10-and-a-half hours of sedentary behavior per day was significantly linked with future heart failure (HF) and cardiovascular (CV) death, even among people meeting recommended levels of exercise. “Our findings support cutting back on sedentary time to reduce cardiovascular risk, with 10.6 hours a day marking a potentially key threshold ...

XI’AN, CHINA [November 15, 2024] — The National Comprehensive Cancer Network® (NCCN®)—an alliance of leading cancer centers in the United States—is taking part in the Fourth International Congress of the Asian Oncology Society and the Chinese Congress on Holistic Integrative Oncology (2024 CCHIO) sponsored by the China Anti-Cancer Association (CACA), Chinese Institute of Development Strategy on Holistic Integrative Medicine, and Asian Oncology Society (AOS). The three-day event highlights international collaborations to improve cancer treatment and outcomes across China and beyond. “NCCN ...

FROM: James Urton University of Washington 206-543-2580 jurton@uw.edu   (Note: researcher contact information at the end)   Hunted nearly to extinction during 20th century whaling, the Antarctic blue whale, the world’s largest animal, went from a population size of roughly 200,000 to little more than 300. The most recent estimate in 2004 put Antarctic blue whales at less than 1% of their pre-whaling levels. But is this population recovering? Is there just one population of Antarctic blue whales, or multiple? Do these questions matter for conservation? A team led by Zoe Rand, a University of Washington doctoral student, tackles these questions ...

A group of South Korean researchers has decided to utilize AI technology to support customer counseling services. Through this, it will provide a significant boost to the performance and efficiency of counselors in various industries, while improving the overall quality of customer counseling services, ultimately making it easier to meet the customers’ needs and expectations while opening up the possibility for realizing new values. Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) announced that ...

The gut microbiome, an ecosystem of trillions of microorganisms in the human digestive tract, has been increasingly linked to chronic diseases. Research led by Dr. Connor Prosty and his team at McGill University consolidates recent findings that demonstrate a causal role for the gut microbiome in the progression of multiple diseases, ranging from gastrointestinal conditions to immune-related and psychiatric disorders. Published in eGastroenterology, this narrative review examines how manipulating the gut microbiome ...

Family Heart Foundation Appoints Dr. Seth Baum as Chairman of the Board of Directors Dr. Seth Baum, Florida Atlantic University, Named Chairman of the Family Heart Foundation’s Board of Directors The Family Heart Foundation® is proud to announce the appointment of Dr. Seth Baum as the Board of Directors Chairman. An esteemed expert in preventive cardiology and lipidology, Dr. Baum has insights and extensive experience that will contribute to the Foundation’s strategic mission to increase awareness for lay public, expand screening for high-risk populations, improve understanding and education for healthcare teams, and promote ...

A new route to materials with complex ‘disordered’ magnetic properties at the quantum level has been produced by scientists for the first time.  The material, based on a framework of ruthenium, fulfils the requirements of the ‘Kitaev quantum spin liquid state’ - an elusive phenomenon that scientists have been trying to understand for decades.  Published in Nature Communications the study, by scientists at the University of Birmingham, offers an important step towards achieving and controlling quantum materials with sought-after new properties that do not follow ...

Basalt samples returned by the Chang’e-6 mission have revealed volcanic events on the lunar farside at 2.8 billion years ago (Ga) and 4.2 Ga, according to research conducted by Prof. LI Qiuli’s lab at the Institute of Geology and Geophysics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. This work was recently published in Nature. “Unraveling the volcanic history of the lunar farside is crucial for understanding the hemispheric dichotomy of the Moon,” said Prof. LI. The asymmetry between the Moon’s nearside and farside—encompassing differences in basalt distribution, topography, crustal thickness, and thorium ...

The Moon has a global dichotomy, with its near and far sides having different geomorphology, topography, chemical composition, crustal thickness, and evidence of volcanism. To better understand this dichotomy, Professor XU Yigang’s team from the Guangzhou Institute of Geochemistry of the Chinese Academy of Sciences investigated lunar soil samples from the far side South Pole-Aitken (SPA) Basin of the Moon returned by the Chang’e-6 mission. Their work was published in Science on Nov. 15. “The samples returned by Chang’e-6 provide a best opportunity to investigate the lunar global dichotomy,” said Professor ...

Dietary zinc deficiency promotes lung infection by Acinetobacter baumannii bacteria — a leading cause of ventilator-associated pneumonia, according to a new study published Nov. 15 in the journal Nature Microbiology.  A Vanderbilt University Medical Center-led team of researchers discovered an unexpected link between the pro-inflammatory cytokine interleukin-13 (IL-13) and A. baumannii lung infection, and they demonstrated that blocking IL-13 prevented infection-associated death in an animal model.  The findings suggest that anti-IL-13 antibodies, which are FDA-approved for use in humans, may protect against bacterial pneumonia in patients with zinc deficiency.  “To ...

In what could one day become a new treatment for epilepsy, researchers at UC San Francisco, UC Santa Cruz and UC Berkeley have used pulses of light to prevent seizure-like activity in neurons.   The researchers used brain tissue that had been removed from epilepsy patients as part of their treatment.   Eventually, they hope the technique will replace surgery to remove the brain tissue where seizures originate, providing a less invasive option for patients whose symptoms cannot be controlled with medication.  The ...

Children born to mothers who take antiseizure medications to manage seizures and psychiatric conditions during pregnancy may face increased risks of neurodevelopmental conditions, according to new data from researchers at Drexel’s Dornsife School of Public Health. The current work -- using data from more than three million children from the United Kingdom and Sweden, including 17,495 who were exposed to antiseizure medications during pregnancy -- found that children exposed to the antiseizure drug lamotrigine ...

Bottom Line: In patients with unresectable, locally advanced esophageal cancer, the triple combination of radiation, chemotherapy, and immunotherapy made tumors more amenable to surgery, which was associated with significantly improved outcomes. Journal in Which the Study was Published: Clinical Cancer Research, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research. Background: “Curative resection unequivocally serves as the cornerstone for treating resectable esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC); ...

Scientists have created a new ‘biocooperative’ material based on blood, which has shown to successfully repair bones, paving the way for personalised regenerative blood products that could be used as effective therapies to treat injury and disease. Researchers from the Schools of Pharmacy and Chemical Engineering at the University of Nottingham have used peptide molecules that can guide key processes taking place during the natural healing of tissues to create living materials that enhance tissue regeneration. The research published today in Advanced ...

The New Phytologist Foundation is delighted to announce that Professor Maarja Öpik will take up the position of Editor-in-Chief of New Phytologist from January 2025 for an initial term of five years. Maarja has served as a member of New Phytologist's editorial board since 2013 and is Professor of Molecular Ecology and Director of the Institute of Ecology and Earth Sciences at the Faculty of Science and Technology at the University of Tartu, Estonia. Maarja’s research addresses the interactions between plants and mycorrhizal fungi, with ...

Mountain lions in greater Los Angeles are proactively shifting their activity to avoid interacting with cyclists, hikers, joggers and other recreationists, finds a study from the University of California, Davis, Cal Poly Pomona and the National Park Service.  The study, published Nov. 15 in the journal Biological Conservation, found that mountain lions living in areas with higher levels of human recreation were more nocturnal than lions in more remote regions who were more active at dawn and dusk. The authors said their findings offer a hopeful example of human-wildlife coexistence amid a large, dense human population. “People are increasingly enjoying recreating ...